Strand, the Story of an Artist

Kevin Kirkwood recently visited Navin's studio to talk about the objects, places, and histories that have shaped his art and practice.
Norling's work spans painting, assemblage, reclaimed windows, salvaged signage, and found objects: materials pulled from the edges of American life and reassembled into layered visual narratives. His practice draws on family history, folk traditions, quilting, and the vernacular of both rural and urban America, transforming discarded things into work that holds memory, identity, and cultural inheritance.
Born in California, shaped by the Bay, New York City, and now Atlanta, Norling brings a wide range of experience to his art. In this conversation, he and Kevin trace the environments that formed him, including the lasting influence of artist Raymond Saunders, and how time in New York deepened his thinking about race, class, and Americana.
They discuss his exhibition Dangerous Games at Johnson Lowe Gallery, exploring the role of whitewashing, visibility, and erasure in his work, and how beauty, humor, and materiality can hold difficult histories.
Learn more:
navinjunenorling.com   |   @navinjunenorling
johnsonlowe.com   |   @johnsonlowegallery
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms. Including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jeffry Loy, an Atlanta-based sculptor, public artist, and metalworker whose work explores the intersection of nature, fire, steel, and public space. Active in the Atlanta art scene for more than 30 years, Loy is known for creating hand-forged botanical sculptures, immersive installations, and large-scale public artworks that blend traditional blacksmithing with modern technology.
A graduate of the Atlanta College of Art and SCAD Atlanta, Loy has exhibited work across the United States, including Georgia, Florida, New York, Texas, Virginia, and California. Working from his longtime studio at The B-Complex artist cooperative in southwest Atlanta, his practice combines sculpture, lighting, fabrication, and public art conservation.
In this conversation, Loy shares stories about growing up in the southeastern United States, traveling to Burning Man in the early 2000s, building a lifelong career in the arts, and helping shape Atlanta’s creative community through spaces like The B-Complex.
The episode also explores craftsmanship, public art, nature, conservation, and the role curiosity plays in sustaining a creative life over decades.
Learn more about Jeffry’s work at firesculptor.com and thebcomplex.com.
Follow Jeffry on Instagram: @spaceorbitstudio | @thebcomplexatl
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.
All images courtesy of the artist.
 

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Yu-Kai Lin, founder and director of Kai Lin Art, a gallery that has played a major role in shaping Atlanta’s contemporary art scene for nearly two decades.
Over the years, Lin has worked with curators, developers, architects, and designers to build collections and curate exhibitions for organizations including High Museum of Art, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Atlanta Hawks, and Emory University. His work moves between the worlds of fine art, education, hospitality, and design, helping connect artists with institutions and audiences across the city and beyond.
A graduate of Emory University with a background in piano performance, Lin approaches creativity as something interdisciplinary and deeply human. In addition to his work as a gallerist and curator, he has given a TED Talk at Emory, taught piano for years, and remained an active voice in Atlanta’s arts community.
In this conversation, they discuss building an arts community in Atlanta, balancing intuition with discipline, sustaining a creative life, and the importance of creating spaces where artists and ideas can grow.
Learn more about Yu-Kai’s gallery: kailinart.com     |     @kailinart
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com    |    @kevinwillpaint     |     @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms. Including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood is joined with Esteban Patino, an Atlanta-based artist whose work explores language, symbolism, and the construction of meaning through painting, sculpture, and collage. Born in Medellín, Colombia, Patino builds visual systems that resemble language while resisting direct translation, moving between abstraction and representation.
His current solo exhibition, Shapeshifter, on view at Spalding Nix Fine Art through May 22, brings together paintings and sculptures developed from an invented symbolic language. Across the work, fragments of recognizable imagery, figures, gestures, and organic forms emerge and dissolve, holding meaning in flux.
Patino’s practice draws inspiration from universal systems of communication, from ancient pictographs to contemporary signage, examining how meaning is constructed, shared, and broken apart. His work asks what it means for form to communicate and whether meaning can ever be fixed.
In this conversation, we discuss his process of building a personal symbolic system, the relationship between sculpture, painting, and collage in his practice, and the tension between clarity and ambiguity in visual language.
Learn more:
esteban-patino.com   |   @estebanpatino
spaldingnixfineart.com   |   @spaldingnixfineart
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Josh Aronson, a Miami-based artist and photographer whose work explores masculinity, vulnerability, and the shifting landscape of the American South. Born in Toronto and raised in Florida, Aronson’s perspective is shaped by a deep familiarity with the region’s contradictions, something that becomes a central thread throughout the conversation.
His photographs, which often blur the line between portraiture and landscape, have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, Financial Times, Frieze, Italian Vogue, Teen Vogue, Dazed, i-D, British Journal of Photography, Document Journal, and Apartamento. Across this work, Aronson engages questions of identity, intimacy, and place, building images that feel both personal and culturally resonant.
He is currently a 2026 Leonian Foundation Fellow in Photography at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Studio Artist-in-Residence at Deering Estate in Florida, and an ON::View Artist-in-Residence at ARTS Southeast in Georgia. His work has been exhibited internationally, and in 2024, he became the only artist to receive both the People’s Choice Award and Juror’s Prize for the City of Miami Beach’s No Vacancy public art commission.
In this conversation, we explore Josh’s early influences and what first drew him to photography, how collaboration and trust shape his process, and the evolving relationship between artist and subject. We also discuss the emotional terrain of the South, the challenge of representing Florida beyond cliché, and what it means to document a place that resists easy definition.
Learn more: | josharonson.us   |   @jda.usa
vcca.com  |   @vacenterforthecreativearts
deeringestate.org   |   @deeringestate
artssoutheast.org   |   @artssoutheast
 
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com  | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand via all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Savannah-based artist Rick Petrea, whose work spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, and collage. For over 30 years, Rick has explored figurative, expressionistic art, occasionally venturing into abstraction. His influences range from Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, and the CoBrA Group to comic books and outsider art, particularly by artists with schizophrenia.
In this episode, Kevin and Rick trace a life devoted to art; from growing up in Savannah to encounters with de Kooning in New York and Emilio Vedova in Venice. They discuss how books, politics, and military service shaped both his worldview and his practice, and how his work bridges Abstract Expressionism, outsider art, and contemporary expression.
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon, and all major platforms.
 

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jason Hoelscher, a painter, writer, and professor whose work explores the dynamics of attention, perception, and visual information.
Hoelscher’s practice sits at the intersection of art, philosophy, and information. His book Art as Information Ecology (Duke University Press, 2021) draws on aesthetic philosophy and information theory to reframe art as a living, complex system rather than a fixed object. His work has been exhibited across the U.S. and internationally, including large-scale public installations in airports and other shared spaces. He has written for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, and serves as a professor and gallery director at Georgia Southern University.
In this episode, Kevin and Jason trace the arc of a practice that moves fluidly between the studio, the page, and the public sphere. They discuss how painting led Jason toward philosophy, why information overload is as much an aesthetic problem as a cultural one, and what it means to create work that doesn’t just fill space but actively shapes how it’s experienced.
Learn more: jason-hoelscher.com | @jason_hoelscher_studio
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood visits the Savannah, Georgia studio of painter Christopher Moss, a space Christopher built by hand alongside his father, and the setting for an afternoon conversation about memory, place, and the quiet work of building a creative life.
Together, they trace his path from a childhood in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, through earning his MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College, to the practice he has cultivated in Savannah. Along the way, they reflect on what it means to create paintings rooted in a sense of home, and how that sense evolves over time.
Christopher’s recent exhibitions include a two artist show with Sue Fox at Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA), as well as EASTSIDE 11 at Ology Gallery (Savannah). The conversation also looks ahead to his participation in ArtFields 2026, one of the largest art competitions in the South, on view April 10 through May 2.
Learn more: christophermoss.biz | @mrhopthescissor
@lyndonhouseartscenter
@ologygallery
@artfieldssc
Follow the host, Kevin Kirkwood: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaintFollow the show: @strandpodcast
The Strand is available at the link in bio or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon, and all major platforms.
 

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Erin Dunn, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia. Since 2014, Erin has organized exhibitions including Watershed: Contemporary Landscape Photography, Feels Like Freedom: Phillip J. Hampton, and Frank Stewart's Nexus: An American Photographer's Journey. She also leads the #art912 initiative, a program dedicated to supporting artists working in Savannah.
Her most recent exhibition, Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now, co-curated with Beryl Gilothwest, is the first major show to explore the influence of Ossabaw Island on American artists. The exhibition spans 26,000 undeveloped acres off the Georgia coast and highlights the legacy of two groundbreaking residency programs, featuring work by internationally renowned artists including Harry Bertoia, Agnes Denes, Sally Mann, Anne Truitt, and a new commission by Allison Janae Hamilton.
In this conversation, we explore Erin’s early life and the path that led her into curatorial work, the process behind building Off the Coast of Paradise, and the challenges of representing complex and layered histories. She also shares candid advice for emerging artists looking to connect with institutions.
Learn more: Telfair.org  | @telfairmuseums  | @erindunn_art  
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Ivy Laurel Anderson, a fiber artist and sculptor based in Savannah, Georgia. Using a knitting machine as her primary tool, Ivy wraps discarded everyday objects in elastic knitted membranes that stretch, sag, and conform to whatever lies beneath. Her ongoing series, Somethings, transforms castaway materials into forms that are by turns humorous, unsettling, and oddly moving.
Her work has been recognized by the International Design Awards, the Red Dot Design Awards, and ArtPrize, and her practice has taken her from Japan to Italy through residencies and exhibitions across the country.
In this conversation, we explore her path from fashion to fiber sculpture, her relationship with the knitting machine, and what it means to find beauty in the overlooked and forgotten.
Learn more: ivylaurelanderson.com   |   @ivylaurelanderson
Follow the host: kevin-kirkwood.com  | @kevinwillpaint | @strandpodcast
Listen to The Strand on all major platforms. Including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and Amazon.